Site Feature Builds
6 posts in this series
How I built a custom analytics system with interactive visualizations, IP intelligence, and a Leaflet world map, using Next.js, Neon Postgres, and Claude Code. Includes the full Vercel Analytics integration and why custom tracking fills the gaps.
A technical deep-dive into implementing production-grade SEO for a Next.js site, covering dynamic sitemaps, JSON-LD structured data, OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, RSS feeds, canonical URLs, and everything Google needs to actually find your website.
How I built a full newsletter system for this site with secure subscriptions, HMAC-verified unsubscribes, branded HTML emails, and a Vercel Cron that sends a weekly digest every Monday. Includes the WAF rule that broke everything and the firewall tightening that followed.
How I built a subscriber-gated comment system with thumbs up/down reactions, admin moderation, and a one-time welcome email blast, including the PowerShell quirks and Vercel WAF rules that nearly blocked everything.
How I made each weekly digest newsletter unique by using Claude Haiku to generate two-paragraph intros with historical tech facts, holiday callouts, and graceful fallback when the API fails.
How a basic page-view tracker evolved into a 9-section, 26-component analytics command center with heatmaps, scroll depth tracking, bot detection, and API telemetry. Includes the reasoning behind every upgrade and enough puns to make a data scientist groan.